A. Homes - The End of Alice

Back at the cabin, our quirky campground, she unzips her new bag and feigns surprise to find it filled with little things, “gifts” she calls them.

“What makes you do a thing like that?” I ask, appalled. “Leave me alone,” she says, opening a jar of Noxzema, smearing a thick layer, a mask, over her face. “Do you have to know every thought in my head?”

“Yes.”

“Come here then.” She beckons to me with a finger coated in cold cream — if only it were frosting, I’d suck it off. She digs a hole through the muck on her face. “My first pimple,” she says, showing me a hivey swelling.

“It’s a mosquito bite.”

“Zit.”

Crabby, she goes into the kitchen, opening and closing every cabinet. “There’s nothing to eat.”

“You’ve been eating all day.”

She moans.

“There’s a bowl of fruit on the table, a perfect still life I arranged myself.”

“Something sweet,” she cries. “I crave sugar.”

“Wash your face,” I say, forced to surrender my reading. I find her on her knees rummaging through the lower kitchen cupboards, a dust mouse clinging to her cheek.

I make her a cup of cocoa, which temporarily calms her. She sits sipping it, legs splayed akimbo on a chair.

All too easily I am able to look up her dress. Her mound is dappled with down, a disgusting dusting of hair, imparting the impression of a milk mustache, something you’d be inclined to wipe away.

“You know, dear,” I say, “one day you’ll have to begin wearing underwear.”

“I doubt it,” she answers, draining her cup. “More?”

I shake my head. “That was the last of the milk.”

She picks herself up, puts her cup in the sink, and goes into the bedroom.

I decline to follow, temporarily glad to have her gone, to have a moment’s rest.

“Yoo-hoo,” she calls after a while. “What’re you doing?”

“Enjoying my book.”

“Oh.” There is a pause. “I’m bored.”

Closing my text, taking care to mark my spot with a slip of paper, I find her in the bedroom.

With her hair, her long locks, she has tied herself to the bed, dividing her tresses into two pigtails, wrapping the ropes around the frame, establishing herself as quite racked out.

I kiss her titties, which are beginning to grow like globes, and sit beside her on the bed.

“I want you to hurt me,” she says.

“It’s against my inclination.”

“Please, don’t make me beg. I need you to hurt me.” She pauses. “Make an exception.”

“What do you have in mind?”

She glances at her hunting knife resting in its sheath on the table by the bed. “That.”

“No.”

She nods. “Yes,” she says quite firmly.

I shake my head. “I have no interest in causing you pain,” I say, walking away. “In fact I have the idea that perhaps you’ve already had too much.”

“What about the others? Did you care so much about them? There were others before me, weren’t there? Surely this isn’t the first time?”

“Stop it. Just be quiet.”

“Make me.”

I am silent.

She wiggles her foot. “Tie it up.”

Using the clothesline that’s hanging off the bed, I bind her ankle. She wiggles the other one. I do the same again. “There,” I say. “That’s all.”

She shakes her head.

I look at her spread out, gorgeous wine stain on her thigh. It is not her desire that fails, but my heart. It cannot summon itself to pump blood to the necessary places. I am left to fuck her with my fingers.

“More,” she says. Already I’ve got two in, but I manage to fit a third.

“More,” she says again.

My pinky pokes at the edge of her ass. I’m so unhappy. I’m doing it entirely dispassionately.

In the last weeks, she has added some extra flesh, a fast seven or eight pounds, her fresh breasts jiggle, like pudding not quite set.

Transcending the limits of skin — there are moments in sex when you flash upon the idea that she might give herself to you, make the sacrifice of complete surrender, the prospect of death seems quite possible, acceptable, even desired. The most extreme and rare of sensations, true intimacy, something to aspire to.

I glance down and notice her foot has turned blue.

“Wiggle your foot,” I shout, penetrating our daze. “Wiggle your foot.”

She doesn’t respond except to lift her head and blurrily ask, “What?”

There isn’t time to undo the knot. Reaching for the hunting knife, I cut the rope away. The foot is purple. A thick line shows where the rope was laid. I gently massage the part. “Does it hurt? Can you feel anything?”

“Who cares,” she says, lying back. “Just keep going.” She raises her hips up and down. “Just fuck me. Is that asking too much?”

My fingers slide in, one, two, three…. My hand is inside her, her heartbeat on my fist.

She sleeps soundly until seven when the cowbell is banged.

“How’s your ankle?” I ask as she gets ready to go.

She looks at me as though she has no idea what I’m talking about. I say no more.

While she’s away, I sneak off to the store and stock the larder, purchasing all the makings of a picnic and more, a wide variety of cakes and cookies, two or three or everything. I can’t afford to lose her over the triviality of sweets.

During the evening I venture out, filling a jar with fireflies. Awake, waiting for her, my heart beats erratically, part broken. She doesn’t return until nearly eleven, as always preferring the window to the door. I’ve fixed a little ladder to make her entrances easier. “Gram wasn’t feeling well,” she says, slipping into bed. “I had to sit with her for a while.”

We make up tenderly, my heart well primed for the occasion. The green glow of glitterbugs fills the cabin.

“It’s more than half over,” she says in the middle of the night.

“Shhh. You’re talking in your sleep.”

“Obviously.”

In the morning I pack a picnic lunch and we set off toward the lake. I pull the rowboat out of the scrub and into the water. In the middle of the lake she undresses. “I love to sunbathe,” she says, easing out of her shorts. The boat rocks unevenly.

My eyes spin along the shore, worried someone will see, still convinced this is a setup.

She reaches into the basket for a sandwich; a roll of flesh protrudes from her belly. It wasn’t there before. There was nothing extra when this started. “Why are you here for the whole summer?” she asks, biting into a ham salad, pink meat squirting out of the corners of her mouth. I look away. “Why don’t you have a job? Don’t most men work?”

“I quit my job,” I say, thoroughly distracted.

“And in the fall what will you do?”

“Marry you,” I offer softly.

She eats a fistful of potato chips. “I’ll be in school.”

I can’t look at her. “We’ll run away,” I say, staring at a distant dock.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere you want to go.”

“To hell in a handcart,” she says.

I glance at her feet, there’s a mean bruise on her ankle. I ask again, “How’s your ankle?”

“Oh, I must have banged it.”

“It’s bruised.”

“Things happen.” She opens another sandwich. “I forgot to tell you, you were supposed to come for dinner night before last. Gram was looking forward to meeting you.” My ire, my powerlessness, pulsates. I’m at the mercy of a master. “Pity you forgot.”

“Actually, I told them you must have forgotten. ‘Do we give second chances?’ Gram asked me. ‘Rarely,’ I said.” There’s no way I can win.

She continues to eat. When she’s done she suddenly stands. “I hate water,” she says. “It terrifies me.” And then she is in. She’s jumped naked into the lake and I haven’t the slightest idea of what to do. Is this her idea of an afternoon swim, another of her juvenile jokes, a devilish game of cat and mouse? Am I supposed to go after her, make a mad dash into the water? Or did she go to escape me, to prove she couldn’t be possessed?